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Ibanez Telesavalas
The Ibanez Telesavalas was the custom guitar of Paul Gilbert, most notably used in his 1987 Intense Rock ''video. It most closely resembles an Ibanez RG in pastel pink/purple with a matching pickguard. After Paul and Bruce had their custom Iba-Phones made, Paul's pink one became his primary guitar. When he started doing clinic circuits for Ibanez, he would bring his Iba-Phone. Soon, however, he decided to start playing the stock Ibanezes at the stores in order to demo the local gear. After playing several RGs, he realized that he actually preferred them to his custom guitar and asked Ibanez to make him a new custom guitar that was made in the style of the RG series. The guitar has one volume knob which controls a Seymour Duncan Vintage Firebird in the neck and a DiMarzio Super Distortion in the bridge. It was originally fitted with a Kahler locking tremolo that has since been removed. The word "Telesavalas" is printed in small print on the headstock. The guitar is named after American actor Telly Savalas, who most notably played Ernst Stavro Blofeld in ''On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Current location In 2003, one of the administrators of the official Racer X forums (Chad) posted to Jemsite, an Ibanez fan board, confirming that he was the current owner of the Telesavalas. The original text is posted below: "''A few years back, Paul yanked the Duncan mini HB out of the bridge and they put in a DiMarzio single coil and a DiMarzio sustainer system. I don't know who did it, because the DiMarzio sustainer back then was made for a 22 fret guitar. Paul was laughing telling me about it. Also, the guitar originated with a Kahler tremolo (the old school) and then got a Spyder, and finally Paul put the hard tail on there with some creative woodworking. When I was out at Paul's place in September of '02 for the recording of the newest Racer X record, I found Tele hanging out in the guest bedroom in a pile of Ibanez teles and talmans. I HAD to rescue it. Dude! It's the Intense Rock guitar! No damn way! It was a wreck. Strings against the frets, the sticky stuff that held the fringe to the guitar was all over the place, as well as the residue from where the F-holes were when he was using the guitar in the Navy Seals soundtrack days. I pulled it out and asked Paul about it, and he told me it was in his plans to redo the thing, he just didn't have time. A few months passed, and Paul contacted me about putting together a list management system to organize the thousands of emails that he gets every year. Well, over a ten year period, that was a TON. So I told him I'd do it and it would be no sweat. He then said, (in my best sparcely worded PG impression) "would a Telesavalas cover it?" Bam sure as **** on my doorstep showed up MY holy grail of shred guitar. I'd like to think of myself as a wired-in VIP type of dude, but it's more like, Ken and I do the Racer X site for free, so they gave us Custom Shop PGM's. I did a mailing list database, so I got the Tele. Actually, Paul was moving to L.A. from Vegas at that time...I look at it like he was thinking "one less thing to move." References